Washington State University Libraries

Cage 756

Whitman County Historical Society

Oral Histories

Collection, 1977-1984

Acquisition and Processing Information

In 1980, the Whitman County Historical Society (WCHS) donated these materials to Washington State University's Instructional Media Services (IMS) under a joint agreement restricting access to and use of the materials in this collection. In September of 2010, the materials (UA 2010-10) were moved from IMS (by then renamed as Media, Materials, and Reserves, or MMR) to WSU's Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, and the access and use restrictions were removed. The collection was processed from October to December, 2010, by University Archivist Mark O'English with aid from graduate student Timothy Mace. In fall of 2014, a full comparison to holdings at WCHS was conducted by Luke Sprague, with some supplemental materials added and some corrections made.

Extent/Quantity Information

Project History

Between November, 1977 and October, 1978, Margot Knight and Kay Kenedy Turner conducted oral history interviews with early settlers of Whitman County for the Whitman County Historical Society (then headed by Dr. Roy Chatters). The project was supported by the Comprehensive Education and Training Act (CETA) Title VI. The materials were subsequently used to create a KWSU radio series (Palouse in the Past Tense) which had 75-80 episodes, four articles in the Bunchgrass Historian, and a Readers Theatre playlet, Palouse Past. A few additional interviews were conducted by others and subsequently added to this collection.

Collection Description

The collection consists of 118 interviews created between 1977 and 1984 with Whitman County elders. Each interview can include some or all of the following: print summaries of the interviews with transcripts, reel-to-reel tapes, and cassette tapes. The cassette tapes are the original interviews, while the reel-to-reels were created from those circa the early 1980s for preservation purposes. The physical materials are primarily photocopies of originals held at WCHS.

Collection Arrangement

The materials in this collection are organized by item type. Box 1 contains all printed materials, with three folders of administrative materials followed by one folder for each interviewee, sorted alphabetically. The administrative materials do include a copy of Guide to the Whitman County, Washington oral history collection edited by Margot H. Knight, and Palouse Past, adapted by Gail Miller and Margot H. Knight. Each folder contains a permissions form, an interview summary, and may also contain a transcript as well as other related materials. Boxes 2-10 contain the reel-to-reel tapes, also in alphabetical order. Many reel-to-reels contain multiple interviews, preventing proper alphabetization in some cases. Further, in many cases two half reel-to-reels are on separate reels, so what is listed as 1 full reel may actually be two sides of consecutive reels. Boxes 11-14 contain the cassette tapes, again in alphabetical order.

For ease of access, a list of each interviewee is provided below, telling which boxes hold the print materials, cassettes, and reel-to-reels for that interviewee. In four cases, joint interviews were conducted with multiple interviewees present, and in those cases one person's entry will include redirectional notes to the relevant materials.

Subjects

Access

This collection is open and available for research use. Reproduction of some items may be limited due to conditions imposed by the interviewees at the time the tapes were created.

When this collection was donated to WSU in 1980, a number of restrictions were placed upon its use by the Whitman County Historic Society, notably that use of each interview must be tracked by paperwork, that permission must be granted by the WCHS for any reproduction or use in publication, and that WCHS must be credited in any use of the collection. Upon transfer to MASC in 2010, Ed Garretson of WCHS was consulted, and with the approval of the WCHS Board it was agreed that given MASC's greater security and its registration of users, all the WCHS-placed restrictions upon access and reproduction could be lifted, save that WCHS should still be credited in any sort of publication (use of the collection name, Whitman County Historical Society Oral History Collection, in citations should prove sufficient). In May, 2015, the board agreed to MASC hosting a digital collection of these. As noted above, individual restrictions placed by interviewees still apply.

A printed guide to the collection was published in 1980 by the Whitman County Historical Society: Guide to the Whitman County, Washington oral history collection / edited by Margot H. Knight. This is held in print format in the WSU Libraries at F897.W6 G85x, and a copy can be found in Box 1 of this collection. This can also be viewed digitally at http://hdl.handle.net/2376/4235.

The script to a 1980 play adapted from these, Palouse Past, can be found in folder 1.5 in this collection. The WSU campus performance of this was videotaped, and can be found on a U-Matic tape in WSU MASC's Eastern Washington Historical Media Collection (SC 13), item 6.